Facebook’s New Newsfeed Brings Back Old Features

Late last night Facebook’s Mark Tonkelwitz published an updated blog post explaining that users now have the option to ‘sort’ their newsfeed.

The update will see a filter link added to the top of your newsfeed, clicking on it will give you the option of how to arrange your newsfeed.

The ‘Highlighted Stories First’ option will continue to serve content from your friends the Facebook flags as important, whereas the ‘Recent Stories First’ option will order items in reverse chronological order, much like the ‘old’ newsfeed, although this will not be as comprehensive as the Facebook ticker.

This could be seen as Facebook giving the public what the want, but it could also be seen as clever ‘new coke-esque’ marketing ploy. By introducing a feature that doesn’t go down well with the majority of the public, and then reverting back to the original, Facebook not only wins the haters over by giving them a choice, but also gets people talking about it.

Facebook’s timing with this couldn’t be better, with Google+ gaining more and more momentum by launching their brand pages, Facebook have been forced to do something to keep in the news, is this it?

If you haven’t seen the update yet, Facebook will be rolling it out to all users over the next few days.

Readers: Will you be reverting to the ‘old’ news feed? Is this Facebook giving users what they want, or a clever marketing ploy?

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This post was written by Rob McNair

Rob has experience advising some of the worlds most iconic brands. He thrives on helping improving social media knowledge within organisations with the ultimate goal of making theirs brands more social, transparent and accountable.